7 Ways Leaders Can Foster Innovation

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made waves with his purchase of the Washington Post (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post has caught our collective attention. We’re eager to see what the Internet entrepreneur, “digital native,” and boundary-breaking trailblazer with a track record for building new business models in unknown frontiers will do with the Post. Some relegate newspapers to has-beens, lumping them together with physical bookstores—relics of the pre-digital age. But others are hopeful that with Bezos’s bold leadership and understanding of consumer buying habits and online advertising, a break-through business model will emerge to invigorate the Post, and become a model to carry other newspaper companies into the future.

In a letter to Post employees, Bezos reassured the editorial side of the paper and loyal readers by saying that the values of the newspaper and its standards do not need changing. He acknowledged the Graham family’s “principled manner” and their “stewardship of important values.” Still we’re left with the question: What will his ownership mean for the business side? He has said that he will take the newspaper private. This is a huge pause for Bezos and the Post as they search for a new, long-term, sustainable business model out of public view and without the pressure by investors for more profits and the scrutiny of shareholders.

Common Themes Emerge from Bold Innovators

Whether experimenting out of public view or transparently in view of all stakeholders, it is clear that leaders have to be bold thinkers and from the top-down or across the board, they play a primary role in fostering innovative organizations. Innovation is the high-performance mantra of most business gurus. We praise the merits of innovation to our clients. We worship its virtues. We grant sainthood to the icons of innovation, waiting with baited breath for every new potential product or service to transform our lives. The religious fervor around innovation is for good reason. In today’s world, innovation is the new leadership. But as much as we laud the value-creating potential of innovation, we rarely ask ourselves, “Where does innovation come from? Where does it begin? What does it look like? How does it become embodied in the people and the culture of organizations?

In the organizations that we study and advise, several characteristics continually emerge as keys for fostering innovation at all levels. Here are a handful of examples:

Jeff George, global head of Sandoz, has made Sandoz a highly sought after culture for global talent. He goes out of his way to recruit, develop, acknowledge and appreciate people. Members of his team consider working with him one of the best experiences of their careers. George drives business results because he creates a great culture. He gets some of his balance by meditating to renew awareness and clarity. Commenting on his practice, he said, “I tend to be energetic and driven. Meditation helps me to bring my whole self—drive and heart, passion and purpose—to all that I do and into all my interactions with my teams.”

While many publishing companies have closed their doors during the last 20 years, Berrett-Koehler (BK) has been thriving. Steve Piersanti, founder and president, established BK on a stewardship model. He explained, “When you choose the context of stewardship, the language of the model influences your entire perception from how you make decisions about what books to publish to how you regard all the stakeholders.” Stewardship brings people together around a common purpose and a spirit of innovation generated by an intense desire to serve in new ways.

Marc Belton and Mark Addicks of General Mills talk about staying connected to a sense of purpose, creative partnership, the value of learning and gaining perspective from innovators in other industries.

Daniel Vasella, former chairman and CEO of Novartis, is known in the industry as the life science leader who always did the unexpected and succeeded. Asked about this reputation, he explained, “Each key strategic move made over the years has come out of a reflection, an independence of thinking that was bigger than conformity. Personally and professionally, conformity is not important. What is crucial once one sees a new innovative way is to test it out, to get both challenge and support from competent people.” Vasella made a multibillion-dollar bet by establishing a global research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts that has set the standard for the industry. With a few thousand people from
Novartis, the center draws on the research and academic talent from MIT, Harvard, and other institutions in the area, and globally. It has become the industry standard for developing great people and new compounds. Vasella said “What looked like a radical, revolutionary move in the industry was something that just made sense to me and to Mark Fishman, M.D., who came from academic research at Harvard to run Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research.

Jane Stevenson, vice chairman, Korn/Ferry’s CEO & Board Services group, and coauthor of Breaking Away: How Great Leaders Create Innovation That Drives Sustainable Growth—and Why Others Fail, shared: “It starts at the top, but innovation is a team sport. Each person needs to feel that they matter, that the outcome wouldn’t be the same without their contribution. One of the key jobs of leaders is to make sure each person has a clear sense of purpose and value in connection to the larger mission…In this kind of collaborative, abundance mentality, there is a limitless mentality about what can be achieved.”

As you can see, common themes surface. Take a moment to consider how these 7 leadership practices for fostering innovation are showing up in your organization. What can you do differently and courageously to challenge and encourage innovation in your organization?

Be On-Purpose: Take the time to clarify your motivating values and compelling purpose, individually and collectively. Purpose fuels energy and drive to go beyond what is and to persevere until something extraordinary has been created. Purpose is the value-creating, energy-multiplying life force of innovation. Is purpose driving performance, or has performance become your purpose?

Question and Listen: Step back to be open and curious. Ask questions and listen deeply. Strive to ask the extra question to challenge yourself and others to go deeper and stretch further. Seek diverse viewpoints. Constant inquiry and questions form the linguistics of innovation.

Risk Experimentation: Have the courage to accelerate through failure by building momentum and speed through new learning. Experimentation steers us to our eventual destination through roadblocks, twists and turns, as long as we are learning agile and courageous enough to persist. Step back to make sure that your behaviors, systems and processes are not barriers to risk experimentation. Make sure your key people are encouraged to spend at least 15 percent of their time exploring and prototyping new ideas.

Reflect and Synthesize: Set aside time for integration and synthesis. A CFO sets aside every Sunday evening to mind map his most complex or strategic issues. He gets all the pieces laid out and then links them up by associating the divergent parts into an integrated whole. Identify your best way to daily or weekly cut through the clutter to gain clarity and new possibility. Leadership creates clarity out of chaos.

Foster Generativity: Take the time to connect, coach, mentor, and develop your people. Constructively challenge their thinking, strategy, and behavior through the lens of innovation. Stretch people to create, innovate, and envision alternative futures. Grow your people to grow a culture of innovation.

Be Authentic: The innovation potential of teams or organizations will be directly proportional to your innovation embodiment. Make sure your own behaviors are not unintentionally limiting an innovation around you. Ask, “How could I encourage even more innovation here?” Be the collaborative innovator you wish to see in your organization.

Kevin Cashman is the Global Leader of CEO & Executive Development at Korn Ferry. He has coached thousands of CEOs, senior leaders and teams in more than 60 countries, with an emphasis on optimizing executive, team and purpose driven enterprise leadership. He is the auth...